An airline SNAFU caused a United flight to spend hours taxiing around the tarmac, boarding, deboarding, reboarding, and finally, after 8.5 hours of this, cancel. I hope they played the Benny Hill theme.
Ultimately, after 2.5 more hours of taxiing—8.5 hours of taxiing in total—the on-board crew clocked out and the flight returned to the gate to be anulled. In addition to the extensive delay, it took another half hour to disembark the aircraft. Passengers were only given "a cup of water and a tiny packet of those biscoff cookies" during the entire 8.5 hour event. It was also reported that the pilots were "out of apologies." Hiroko Tabuchi, a New York Times Reporter who was on the flight, had this to say about the incident: "You can't make this up.. my United flight out of Newark taxied on the tarmac for more than 6 hours, and now no longer has enough fuel to get to Denver — so we are taxiing back to the terminal."
